de foie gras, gateau, Grec, Amontillado;
wearing less sealskin and sables, buying fewer pigeon-blood rubies,
absolutely mortifying the flesh in order to offer a contribution out of
our pockets to God, how ingeniously we devise schemes to extract the
largest possible amount of purely personal pleasure from the
expenditure of the sum, we call our contribution to charity? We build
chapels, and feed orphans, and clothe widows, and endow reformatories,
and establish beds in hospitals, how? By a devout, consecrating
self-denial which manifests itself in eating and drinking, in singing
and dancing, at kirmess, charity balls, amateur theatricals, garden
parties; where the cost of our XV. Siecle costume is quadruple the
price of the ticket that admits to our sacrifice of black and white
kids in the same sanctuary. We serve God with one hand, and we surely
serve with the other the Mammon of selfishness and vanity. We have
Lenten service, Lenten dietetics, Lenten costumes even; Lenten
progressive euchre, Lenten clubs; but where are the Lenten virtues,
where the genuine humility, charity, self-dedication of body and soul
to true holiness?"

"The church is a school. If pupils will not heed admonition, and defy
the efforts of instructors, is the institution responsible for the
failure in education? The eradication of selfishness is the mission of
the churches; and if we individually practised at home a genuine
self-denial for righteousness' sake, we should collectively show the
world fewer flaws for scoffing reprimand."

"The Shepherds are too timid to control their flocks. If they only had
the nerve to pick us up, turn our hearts inside out, show us the black
corners, and the ossifications, and call sin, sin, we should begin to
realize what despicable shams we are. Dr. Douglass, the Bishop, is the
only one I know who lays us on the dissecting table, and who does not
speak of 'human fallibility' when he means vice. He told us one day
that the Gospel required a line of demarcation between the godly and
the ungodly, between Christians and unbelievers; but that it has become
imaginary like the meridian and the equator; and that he very much
feared the strongest microscope in the laboratories could not find
where the boundary line ran between the World, the Flesh and the Devil,
and the Kingdom of God in our souls. I am sorry a distant State called
him to her Episcopal chair, for his cold steel is needed among us. Now
tell me, Leo, what